Tag Archives: Down

Two Reviews: Eyehategod and Enabler (2014)

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Eyehategod – Eyehategod (Housecore Records, 27 May 2014)

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Enabler – La Fin Absolue du Monde (The Compound, 27 May 2014)

 

I will not be getting any sleep tonight. I’ve already accepted this as an unfortunate but unavoidable truth, and am now working on moving on. Maybe it’s just me, but I’ve discovered that since about age 30, it has become way more difficult to function on litte (or no) sleep, and now that I’m hitting the halfway point of that decade, getting enough rest has become a very precious commodity. It isn’t ever easy, especially when my two-hour (each way) commute necessitates that I leave home at 5:00 in the morning, meaning I have to wake up around 4-4:30. That wouldn’t be so bad, if I were able to fall asleep around 10:00 each night, but that’s a rare occurrence — and tonight in particular it will be completely impossible.

I’m going to the Eyehategod/Enabler/Ringworm show at The Rex Theater in Pittsburgh (part of the tour I wrote about last week). The show is scheduled to start at 7:00, but in addition to the three touring bands, there had been two local openers scheduled (Under Everything and Hericide), and then somewhere along the way the Dune sandworm-named band Shai Hulud got thrown into the mix (I guess they are currently on their way home from a tour and just happened to be passing through town today and so now apparently they’re playing at this show as well). Naturally, with six bands, even if things kick off exactly at seven, there’s no way it’ll end anywhere before midnight — and that’s the absolute best case scenerio. Add in an hour drive to get home (that two-hour commute I mentioned involves bus-riding and walking), and I probably won’t be able to be in bed any earlier than 2:00. Falling asleep that late and waking up at 4:00 would probably make me even more tired and miserable than if I didn’t sleep at all. So here we are.

But, shit, what am I going to do — NOT go see Eyehategod in their first appearance in this area since …… well, the Bandsintown archive goes back more than seven years and doesn’t have a single Pittsburgh date listed. Neither does Setlist.fm have any mention of them playing here. In fact, the only thing I could find after an extensive five minutes of web-searching was a couple YouTube videos from a show in the summer of 1998. Basically the point I’m trying to make is, this is a pretty monumental event, and if I don’t take advantage of this chance to see one of the most important bands in the history of sludge metal, I might never have another opportunity.

 

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Atlanta’s Order of the Owl, Volume IV Hit the Road En Route to Stoned Goat Festival

Posted by valleyofsteel on

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Atlanteans Order of the Owl and Volume IV are northwardly bound, on their way to the Eye of the Stoned Goat in New England next weekend. But along the way, they’re making a few pit stops — the “No Sleep Till Stoned Goat” mini-tour kicked off last night in Tennessee, and will be followed by jaunts through Pennsylvania and New York before hitting Massachusetts for Sunday’s festival. If you happen to live in the general proximity of any of these shows, I can’t recommend highly enough that you take advantage of your chance to check out both bands.

 

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Out Last Month: Tribune – Elder Lore / The Dark Arts

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Tribune – Elder Lore / The Dark Arts (Corpse Corrosion Music, 20 March 2012)

Whenever I discover a new band, I usually try to learn as much as I can about them, including where they come from. If it’s a country or a city I’m not especially familiar with, occasionally I’ll hit Wikipedia and see if there are any interesting facts to be learned there. Maybe I’m just a major dork, I don’t know. Whatever. Sometimes I like to look at a map of where a band comes from, just to see where it is in relation to things I do know about. This is how I discovered that the city of Burnaby, British Columbia, is right next to Vancouver, near the Pacific coast and just above the U.S./Canada border. Playing with the settings a bit, I found myself looking at a topographic map of that general area. In this way, I found that Burnaby is surrounded by a few lakes, and most of the land seems to be pretty close to sea level anyway. From that I would surmise that there just might be a good bit of swamps or marshlands near that area.

Now, I wasn’t just randomly seeking out information on the geographic characteristics of various cities in Canada. No, I was learning about Burnaby because it’s home to the band Tribune*, to whose recently-released double-EP Elder Lore / The Dark Arts I had just been listening. The blend of riffs and vocals they incorporate into their particular version of death metal might give you the impression that they come from the same backwater bayou country as Down or Crowbar, rather than the frozen tundra of British Columbia, which is what set me on that particular path of research. But anyway, hometown notwithstanding, these guys have put together a combination of styles that I’ve decided to call stoner/death metal. You just need to check it out to see what I mean.
 
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* By the way — I don’t know if it’s a Canadian thing or what, but I’ve learned that the band’s name is pronounced differently than I originally thought. It’s actually supposed to be “TRY-bune” (as in “tribunal”), rather than “TRIB-une” (as in “tribute”).
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